EFF

Yesterday, Google announced that it will begin using copyright takedown notices to influence where sites show up in search results. The general idea behind it is that if a site has a lot of takedown notices (made under DMCA), it risks being demoted in search rankings. Obviously, this new decision has won the hearts of copyright advocates like the MPAA and the RIAA, but it's making those who would keep the Internet free and open a little uneasy.

An update from the whole XDA developer blowup yesterday, data-collection company Carrier IQ has apparently retracted their cease-and-desist letter as well publicized an apology to the security researcher and XDA developer Trevor Eckhart after he published his findings and details of a number of Android phones (the majority being Sprint’s) shipped with a nearly undetectable piece of software built by Carrier IQ that could evidently monitor every move from user keystrokes, to which mobile apps were downloaded and installed.

Privacy is very important to most of us in the tech world. We don’t want carriers following our every step online or in the real world. One Android user gong by the name TrevE discovered a violation for the Android user's privacy being conducted by the Carrier-IQ tracking software a while back. The user then went on to warn all the other Android users out there what he had found.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced that it has talked openly with Amazon about privacy with the new Silk browser that will ship on the Kindle Fire tablet that was announced not long ago. The EFF wanted to find out since the browser on the Fire was new to the market how it was handling privacy. One key element of the browser that is different from most browsers on the market today is that rather than using the HTTP protocol, Silk will use the Amazon cloud servers and the SPDY protocol as well.